Letter to Mrs Cash, p.1 and 4

Description:Eliot writes to Mary (nee Sibree) thanking her for visiting and apologising for not being able to spend more time with her. Eliot and Lewes receive seventeen other visitors on this day!

Transcript:

The Priory,
21, North Bank,
Regents Park.

Mar. 12. 73


My sear Mrs. Cash

Your kind letter received this morning makes me wish to tell you of the sincere joy it gave me to see you again after our long separation, & especially to see you more thoroughly like my friend of old days than I could beforehand have believed to be possible. The years of our separation seemed to shrink as we talked to each other. And that is not often the case in the renewal of a long-broken intercourse. I certainly wished that we could have met on another day than Sunday simply that I might have enjoyed our talk together without the distracting sense that there was another friend in the room who had come from the distance & was going to leave town again immediately. Still, we managed to say a great deal to each other, & your letter gives a welcome supplement.

It would give me hearty pleasure to see Mr. John Sibree, if he should ever come to town. After the beginning of June we have usually taken flight from this next, & are not much to be counted on as Londoners until the end of October.

It is at least a good that your boy is likely to have some years of unobstructed hearing in which he may lay up stores for the time to come. The only streak of unexpected sadness in my interview with you came from this calamity of deafness, which had not entered into my thoughts about you, notwithstanding the well-remembered facts which might have suggested it to me. It had never occurred to our common friends to tell me that your husband had undergone that privation.

Please express my regret to Miss Cash that I could not exchange any words with her so as to find out that she resembled her mother in tone of voice as well as in expression of face. Her mother's friend can only wish that the resemblance may go very deep.

Mt Lewes had great satisfaction in shaking you by the hand & seeing your face. When our other friends were all gone, he said 'Dear! Mrs. Cash is a very sweet woman.'

Always

Yours affectionately

M. E. Lewes


Note: George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) was a local authoress based in the Coventry and Nuneaton district, from 1819-1880.